Post navigation

Men, Women, Heavy Equipment and Flowers

This post is for my cute husband. Does that gross anybody out?
PDA on the blog. He gets a blog post all his own because
A) he is in Amsterdam wretchdly sleep-deprived waiting for a plane to take him those last couple of inches (on my map) to Oslo, and I miss him. And….

B) he told me four times last night that I have to write this on the blog because he thinks

1) it is much more funny than it really is, and 2) it reflects the universal breakdown in communication between Men and Women.

So, in order to get to this story you have to lean way back to May 16, 2002, on which day, Jon hopped into his fun little convertible on a flawless blue-sky California morning with the intoxicating scent of jasmine heavy in the air.

(His car would have been just in the driveway at the back of the photo here.) And before he drove out across the canyon to Loma Linda, just a little too casually he asked if I would be home that day….as something was being delivered and I should be there when it arrived. I smiled, nodded, and then hauled my 35 weeks pregnant/almost 40 year old hulk towards our house, which was almost entirely in the deep throws of major renovation, thinking “Flowers, he’s sending flowers….what a guy” So the day droned on, I and my four little darlings doing domestic things………. the things we did on any ordinary California day…….like A-beka Math, fumigating black widow spiders in the day…….like A-beka Math, fumigating black widow spiders in the Tonka trucks, shooting the odd rattle snake, shooing tarantulas out of the kitchen, and watching coyote packs drink out of the baby pool.

And after lunch I began to fill the large wash tub in the laundry room with water so I could bathe some animal.

Then, I heard the sound of a large truck (Uncommon for us out in the wilderness where we lived) and I dropped everything and went to investigate.

It was a big giant truck trying to tie itself into a tiny knot so it could fit through the hairpin turn with gateposts on either side which was our driveway. When the side of the truck kissed the gate and kept plunging ahead, the screeching of metal completely liquified my spine. I nearly fainted.

It was also noticing that it wasn’t a florist’s truck.

I think the driver decided to off-load his parcel at the foot of the driveway, and bring it up on that machine that is some kind of cousin of a bob-cat, which you sometimes see clinging for dear life on the tailgate of an 18-wheeler.
I was thinking “What on earth…?” or something similar and he was hauling this enormous box, larger than larger than the bob-cat thingy that was pushing it up the 45 degree incline to the house. Without a word of English, and my not knowing how to understand what he said in Spanish, he drove it into the garage, set it down, handed me an invoice and left.

I marched down right behind him to see what he had done to the cast iron gate (which I had just finished painting)……..

.and examined the chipped bricks which would need to be filled in and repainted, grumbling a little as I went along. Here is a photograph of that gate, just to give you an idea.

I read the invoice and saw that a very, very nice table saw had just been bestowed upon us.
And so I trudged into the kitchen, thinking that a table saw would certainly help us finish the renovations more than flowers would have.

And then I heard water running. And for a minute or two, I continued to hear water running, until it dawned on me that I had left the washtub filling…..I had completely and utterly forgotten it as I was so freaked out by that truck demolishing my gate post.

Well……the laundry room (where the water was running) was a long skinny room, with the ironing board along one side, and an iron on it, which was turned on. It was plugged into an extension cord, and the connection was on the floor.

But I didn’t think about that when I saw that the floor was 3 inches deep in the water
which had overflowed the sink. So I headed straight for the faucet intending to turn off the water,
and planted my right foot squarely on the little bit of exposed electricity just at the connection between the iron and the extension cord.

And I felt the most astonishing sensation of electricity in my face. It threw me back, and I grabbed the cord and pulled it out of the wall

A few of us spent the rest of the day wet-vaccuuming the lime green carpet of that laundry room. And later, I ripped the carpet out, before heading down the driveway to plaster over the missing chunk of my gate-post.

He heard the story last night for the first time, and now he sees this as some kind of metaphor for all marriage miscommunication.
In addition, he laughed his head off.
It was one of those things where his laughter was funnier than the joke.

So then I was laughing at him, and he was laughing at this thing that’s really no funnier than a whole lot of other days I can remember at that address in the desert in California.

I often look around myself in Canada, and California seems like another universe, entirely.